Deeplinks Blog posts about File Sharing

Are you an attorney licensed to practice law in the United States? If you are, EFF needs your help to fight spam-igation.

The U.S. Copyright Group has quietly targeted 50,000 Bit Torrent users for legal action in federal court in Washington DC. The defendants, all Does, are accused of having downloaded independent films such as "Far Cry," "Steam Experiment," and "Uncross the Stars" without authorization. U.S. Copyright Group has recently announced that it will also be targeting unauthorized downloaders of the film "Hurt Locker." News reports suggest that the attorneys bringing these suits are not affiliated with any major entertainment companies, but are instead intent on building a lucrative business model built from collecting settlements from the largest possible set of individual defendants.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a group known as the "U.S. Copyright Group" has quietly targeted 20,000 Bit Torrent users for legal action in federal court in Washington, DC. The targets are accused of having downloaded independent films, including "Steam Experiment," "Far Cry," "Uncross the Stars," "Gray Man" and "Call of the Wild 3D," without authorization. The group plans to target 30,000 more individuals for legal action in the coming months.

This time, the lawyers involved are being explicit about their motivations: it's all about the money. "We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel," said one of the attorneys involved. The cases are taken on a contingency basis, designed so that quick settlements will prove lucrative for both the firm and the copyright owners involved.

Imagine you're a music journalist who maintains a blog. You've just found a great, new, virtually-unknown artist that you want to tell the world about. How can you do so, in a way that is simple and convenient for your readers, but does not place you or your blog's host at risk of being sued?

Thanks to the increasingly aggressive copyright-enforcement tactics of the music industry, this has become a startlingly complicated question with no good answer.

Masnick writes that the mainstream entertainment industry's formula for contending with the Internet — desperately trying to invent "new copyright laws or new licensing schemes or new DRM or new lawsuits or new ways to shut down file sharing" — is counterproductive.

However, there is another solution. Stop worrying and learn to embrace the business models that are already helping musicians make plenty of money and use file sharing to their advantage, even in the absence of licensing or copyright enforcement.

Last week the MPAA and RIAA submitted their comments in the FCC's net neutrality proceeding. As anticipated in EFF's comments, the big media companies are pushing for a copyright loophole to net neutrality. They want to be able to pressure ISPs to block, interfere with, or otherwise discriminate against your perfectly lawful activities in the course of implementing online copyright enforcement measures.